I Love You This Much
She sat on a white, four-poster bed, carefully made up with a lavender duvet and dark purple accents with pale netting hanging from the posts, encasing her in a shroud that seemed to set her into another dimension. Dark hair hung down her back and slightly into her face as she stared at a well-worn stuffed rabbit, held tightly between slender white hands. Closing her eyes, the tears ran faster, and the woman curled up on her side.
Hermione Granger was a grown woman by the standards of the Magical Community, and nearing adulthood by the standards of the Muggle population. Her once bushy hair had tamed into Chesnutt curls, and the buck teeth that had plagued her in early school years had righted themselves as she grew up. With pale skin, large brown eyes, and pink pouty lips, she was beautiful by the standards that mattered so much to the other girls, but Hermione couldn't bring herself to care. Not one little bit. When she compared the idea of wanting to be beautiful to being loved, she just couldn't find the importance.
The one thing Hermione had always wished for had never come true, the one little thing she wanted above all else, above the magic and the grades and the recognition, even more than her friend's safety in her most selfish days, had never come true. She couldn't bear the thought that she'd been so selfish, but admittedly she had. Since she could remember, Hermione had made the same wish on her birthday candles, on wishing wells and fountains; on the wishbone of the turkey they'd had for Christmas when she was little. She wished for the love of her father, to be noticed by him, to be hugged by him. She wished for even a small token of love from him, even if it was just to prepare her favorite dinner especially for her, it would be enough she thought. Hermione had always held out hope that one day he could change and suddenly be what she wanted, but now the dream was dead and buried, along with her father.
Anthony Carl Granger had died nine days prior, on July 7, of a heart attack. Had he not sealed himself in the garage with a box of beer he may have been found in time to be saved, for his daughter to save him along with repairing their nonexistent relationship, but it hadn't worked that way. Now, dressed in black in her childhood room, Hermione mourned over a man she'd loved with no love in return. She mourned the lost days and the tainted memories, and she halfheartedly cursed the selfish man who kept her wishing for so long.
Wiping her eyes and standing up, Hermione stepped out of the black pumps that still had bits of dirt and grass stuck to their soles and sides, and slowly shed the black dress she's worn to the burial. Leaving the outfit on the floor, she stepped through the doorway and across the hall to the bathroom. Turning on the shower, she stripped her undergarments and stepped into the glass container already filling with steam to let the water wash away the outside world. Near scalding water turned her skin bright red and she hardly felt it as it slithered down her body and encased her in warmth that grew each minute she stayed under its stream. Hermione allowed the water to transport her from her mind and forget about thoughts. She washed, shampooed and conditioned, then relaxed under the water until the sting of cold water on hot flesh brought her back, signaling the end of her hot water supply. Gasping and quickly turning off the water, a flusher Hermione scrambled out of the shower and wrapped her body in a maroon towel and her hair in another one. Walking slowly she crossed the hall to her bedroom once again and opened her closet.
Ignoring a bra as she was in her own home, she selected a tank top and covered it with deep blue sweater. After slipping into a comfortable pair of cotton knickers she pulled on her worn pair of jeans and sat at the small desk in the corner of her room. With a Muggle pen and paper, she quickly scribed a letter to her dear friends informing them of the change in her life and asking them to meet her the next day at high noon in the secluded park near her home. Duplicating it, she cast a transportation spell and sent the letters to wherever Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley happened to be.